A prosecutor, an intelligence officer and a counterterrorism police officer threatened him in order to secure false testimony against terror suspects, said Cavit Yılmaz, a defendant who spent nine months in prison before fleeing Turkey to seek asylum in Germany, the Medyascope news website reported on Tuesday.
Yılmaz was arrested in June 2017 on charges of disseminating terrorist propaganda and insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in his social media posts.
He later became a witness in the trial of the murderers of prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz, who was killed by members of the far-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C).
Yılmaz submitted a 15-page petition to the court saying that the officials showed him his fiancée’s photograph and threatened to hurt her if he did not accuse certain individuals specified by the police.
According to the petition Yılmaz was also forced to accuse municipal Republican People’s Party officials of funding youth camps for the leftist terror group.
During his pre-trial detention, a police officer threatened him with torture at secret sites in Ankara, the petition said.
The torture sites in Ankara were exposed after victims of torture and ill treatment had testified in court or told reporters their stories.
The petition also claimed that after he was released pending trial in March 2018, police took Yılmaz into custody where he was forced to give additional testimony for another terror-related investigation.